Elizabeth Haydon - Prophecy - Child of Earth

Ashe considered her words. “What was that comment about my heart supposed to mean?”

Customarily I’d cut your heart out, although it’s fairly obvious someone already has.

Rhapsody looked puzzled; it had been a joke. “That you’re heartless, rude.

Willing to insult the dinner I made you, to spit my tea out, to be unduly offensive. You’re an insufferable pig. You have no respect for anyone. You can’t take a joke, but you expect others to. You’re cranky. Shall I go on? When I said it I was teasing. I no longer am.”

Ashe’s shoulders uncoiled, and Rhapsody heard a deep exhalation of breath from within the hood. They stared at each other for a few moments more. Then the cloaked figure lowered its head.

“I’m very sorry,” he said softly. “Your assessment of me, in all its parts, is correct.”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” Rhapsody said, her heartbeat slowing slightly. “Now, back away. If you still want to fight, I’d be happy to oblige. Otherwise, be on your way.”

Ashe sheathed his sword. The glen they were standing in became immediately darker in the absence of its light. The fire had been roaring in time with her anger; it had settled down somewhat as well, having expended much of its fuel in its fury.

“If you wanted me to leave, why didn’t you just make up a name? I would have left you here, unharmed. You’re lucky. You took an awful risk.”

“What risk?” Rhapsody snapped. “You asked me a question. There was only one possible answer, and it did not consist of making up a name. What if I had and it belonged to some poor innocent whose only crime was being unfortunately tided?”

Ashe sighed. “You’re right. These are bad times, Rhapsody. I know you deserve to hate me forever, but please don’t. I thought you were someone you’re not, and I beg your forgiveness. Many of my friends and countless other innocent people have died at the hands of something sinister that is causing these raids. For a moment I thought it was you.”

“What a coincidence. Achmed thinks it’s you.”

Ashe’s words were soft. “He’s wiser than I thought.”

Rhapsody blinked in spite of herself. There was a poignancy in his words she felt in the depths of her soul. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly, “nothing at all. This was a misunderstanding.” A wry tone came into his voice. “Possibly brought on by that skunk urine, as you so charmingly have named it.”

Rhapsody sat back down by the fire. “You know, Ashe, most people have misunderstandings on a slightly different scale. They argue, they call each other names. My neighbor once threw a plate at her husband. They don’t usually draw weapons on each other. Generally I don’t think what just happened qualifies as a misunderstanding.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “Please tell me what I can do to make it up to you. I swear it won’t happen again. I know you may not believe this, but it was an overreaction to what is happening across the land. War is coming, Rhapsody; I can feel it. And it makes me suspect everyone, even those without any hand in it, like you.”

She could hear the truth in his voice. Rhapsody sighed and considered her options. She could drive him off, refusing to spend another moment in his presence, which would leave her alone and lost in the woods. She could agree to go on with him but remain wary, setting up precautions to avoid further mishap. Or she could take him at his word.

She was too tired to do anything other than the last. “All right,” she said finally. “I guess I can get past this, as long as you promise not to draw on me ever again. Swear it, and we’ll forget this happened.”

“I do,” he said. There was amazement in his voice, and something else that she couldn’t put her finger on.

“And throw away that coffee. It addles your brain.”

In spite of the grimness of the situation, Ashe laughed. He reached into his pack and drew forth the sack.

“Not into the fire,” she said hastily. “We’ll have to evacuate the woods. Bury it in the morning with the waste.”

“All right.”

She tossed another handful of sticks on the fire. It was burning low, apparently tired, too. “And you take the first sleep rotation.”

“Agreed.” Ashe crossed to his spot within the camp and pulled out his bedroll, slipping into it rapidly, as if to show his trust that she would not retaliate on him in his slumber. “Good night.”

“Good night.” In spite of everything that had happened, Rhapsody felt a smile come over her face. She sat back and listened to the nightsounds of the forest, the music the wind made and the song of the crickets in the dark.

He cursed and spurred his horse again. The Orlandan ambassadorial caravan was several days ahead, and he was not making any gains in his quest to catch up with it. Shrike had no need of their company nor any desire for it; by and large he considered the ambassadorial class of Roland to be a pathetic collection of doddering old men incapable of forming a direct statement, let alone a coherent thought. Puppets , he mused sourly, every one of them. Off to pay homage to the new Lord of the Monsters .

His master’s words came back to him as he galloped along the muddy pathway that in drier times was the trans- Orlandan thoroughfare, the roadway built in Cymrian times bisecting Roland from the seacoast to the edge of the Manteids. Anything and everything you can find out about Canrif and what manner of insanity is going on there. Everything, Shrike . The depth of the voice made the inherent threat in the words even more obvious.

Shrike could feel that threat in the wind as well, despite the sweetness that filled the air at Spring’s return. Canrif was a ruin, the rotting carcass of a long-dead age; it should remained that way, left to the scavenging monsters that roamed the peaks and the wind that had not cleansed the memory of what had happened there, even all this time past. He was uncertain as to what he would find when presented at the skeletal court of Gwylliam the Abuser and Anwyn the Manipulator, but whatever it might be, Shrike was fairly certain he would not like it.

Sir Francis Pratt, the emissary from Canderre, blinked several times and swallowed nervously. When this duty had been assigned he had pled rheumatism and an unreliable bladder in the attempt to get out of it, believing that the possible curtailment of his career as an ambassador was preferable to a posting to Ylorc. His attempts had fallen on deaf ears, and now here he was, following a subhuman guide to the head of the jumbled line waiting with grim anticipation to see the new Firbolg king.

His colleagues in the ambassadorial service were as agitated as he was. No chamberlain was present to greet them or to organize their interviews into any semblance of appropriate placement. Instead, emissaries of high-ranking provinces and duchies milled about in confusion, attempting to devise a self-invented pecking order of sorts. This was causing more consternation among the powerful ambassadors than the lesser ones; tempers were running very near the surface as the emissaries from Bethany and Sorbold argued about who should be standing nearer the door. In any civilized court the two men would never have even been invited on the same day, let alone left to sort out their differences themselves.

Canderre, Pratt’s homeland, was a region of little political influence. Among the provinces of Roland it was seen by and large as a low-ranking region, populated primarily by gentlemen farmers, craftsman, merchants, and peasants. None of the more famous of the Orlandan lines lived there, although several of the dukes held Canderian estates, and Cedric Canderre, the province’s duke, came from a House that was considered a reputable one. Therefore it was a major discomfiture to him when the Firbolg guard had come into the room, demanding to know who was there from Canderre. He had considered stepping behind a tapestry but had determined that such an action would cost him his life, not because of its evasiveness but rather due to the hideous stench of the heavy wall hangings. What lay behind them could not possibly be conducive to one’s continued good health.